Technology of the New News Workflow

by Roger Theriault on Feb 21, 2010

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My presentation at WordCamp Miami - Feb 20, 2010. ...

My presentation at WordCamp Miami - Feb 20, 2010.

Covering True/Slant's enhancements to WordPress MU - Editorial and cross-network / multi-site.

Get more details on this topic at http://trueslant.com/rogertheriault/

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Technology of the New News Workflow — Presentation Transcript

Technology of the New News Workflow* Roger Theriault True/Slant *featuring WordPress MU

True/Slant

Contributors - Taibbi

Contributors – Colin Horgan

Contributors – Miles Obrien

Content surfaces on main site

Inbound Traffic

>80% of inbound traffic is to individual posts

We also need to expose these users to True/Slant via the single page template

Widgets

Related Posts and Streams

Topic Streams How to combine?

Every author has a different way to organize categories, and a different opinion of what belongs

We devised a ½ editorial, ½ automated Topic

Fed by designating categories from specific contributors

Fine tuned by manipulating on a post by post basis

Streams

Editorial overrides

Default based on post categories

AJAX of course

Following

Simple list of contributor ids (and topics) stored for each user

AJAX controls

Other modules use the follow data (eg: email alerts, Facebook)

User Activity Feed

Constant stream of user activity on the site

Posts

Comments by user

Comments on user’s post

Headline Grabs

New follows

Etc.

User Activity Feed

Master activity table

Multiple unique indexes

Event type

Acting user

Receiving user

Timestamp

Blog id

Post id or Link id

Comment id

Reciprocal events for receiver

Editorial

Surface compelling content

Leverage existing information

Simple interface

Don’t get in anyone’s way

Comment Curation

Surface the best comments

But permit the entire thread to be seen

Show in streams and activity feeds

Keeps conversations civilized

Comment Curation

Simple AJAX controls to “Call Out” a comment

Alerts hook into it to send user notifications

Rest is templates

Comment Curation

News Now

Network Header

Contributor Tools

Technical Challenges

How to integrate so many blogs?

Consistent experience

Fast performance

Caveat – what we are doing is OK

No need to write everything as a separate plugin

Need flexibility

For easy scalability and maintenance, build hooks and filters in

Be ready to throw a bunch of code away

Don’t hack core! Copy and change functions if needed.

Editorial - AJAX

Editors can’t always remember which tab in Admin to go to, so we put everything right in front of them

Lots of hover – click elements for editors

Some even for contributors

Curate Comments

On backend, simple option storage usually is sufficient for editorial data

Consistent UI elements eliminate complexity

Conditional loading of editor elements and scripts

RSS – no

WordPress tables Posts Table

WordPress MU tables Posts Table Posts Table

WordPress MU tables Posts Table Posts Table Posts Table Posts Table X 300 ?

Shadow tables Posts Table Posts Table Posts Table Posts Table X 300 Master Posts Table

Shadow Tables

Topic Streams

Activity Feed data

Stats data

not individual blog posts

Thank You

Roger Theriault [email_address]

http://trueslant.com/rogertheriault/

True/Slant http://trueslant.com/

“ News is more than what happens”

Technology of the New News Workflow

by Roger Theriault on Feb 21, 2010

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Technology of the New News Workflow — Presentation Transcript